March 18, 1982: Is our "lifestyle" hazardous to our health?

Today, AIDS researchers work across a multifaceted terrain of complex cofactors to fight HIV. But during the earliest outbreaks, everything known today had yet to be understood. In March 1982, The Advocate's Nathan Fain wrote the magazine's first major article on GRID, or gay-related immunodeficiency, which became known as AIDS. Fain, a cofounder of New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis, went on to write a regular column for the magazine called "Health Watch."

Fain tracked the epidemic through early 1982, when the Kaposi's Sarcoma Task Force in Atlanta had counted about 200 dead or very ill men and one woman. "Suspicion fell early on an entire way of living--that of the nearly legendary drug-using, fast-living, and promiscuous urban gay male." Researchers' two primary suspects at the time were "infection with cytomegalovirus (CMV)" within the gay community, and "the use of nitrate inhalants [poppers]." With so much speculation about the epidemic, researchers struggled against their own ignorance about gay people, the medical profession's hostility toward homosexuality, and the suspicion gays had toward this latest form of institutional scrutiny. As Fain noted, "several million gay men view the institution of medicine as another of many enemies." He added, "The sexual athlete has become the object of lively concern. The complexity of these men's lives fascinates researchers. The variety of sex and drugs over the last 10 years is to some the equivalent of a medical trip to the moon."

Find this 1982 Advocate article covering the early days of the AIDS pandemic in its entirety by going to www.advocate.com